


soulmate vignettes

by aparticularbandit



Category: Deputy (TV 2020)
Genre: F/M, Soulmate AU, haven't decided yet, might do more of these, might not all be paulister if i write more
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:09:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23473741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aparticularbandit/pseuds/aparticularbandit
Summary: Deputy soulmate aus.
Relationships: Bill Hollister/Paula Reyes
Kudos: 8





	soulmate vignettes

**Author's Note:**

> I might do more of these, but I haven't decided yet.

She feels it all at once – the new scar etching itself into her flesh – something as familiar to her as breathing. It wasn’t until she burned her fingers on her curling iron that she recognized the sensation as the same – a sharp, hot burning sensation – but a real burn left raw skin or oozing blisters behind where a soulmate scar left only a mirror of itself in her skin. She takes a deep breath and winces.

“Something wrong, Dr. Reyes?”

“No, nothing.” She speaks easy enough around the mask covering her mouth. Her eyes meet those of the surgeon across from her. “Soulmate.”

“ _Right._ ” Julie’s head wobbles back and forth, and she doesn’t ask about it again.

That’s good – Paula doesn’t want to talk about it or the hundreds of others like it carved up and down her skin. Her soulmate, whoever they may be, is a private affair. She doesn’t want to talk about them.

* * *

It’s hours later, after the surgery is finally finished and she’s been able to scrub down, in the privacy of her bathroom in her little apartment overlooking the beach, that she finds the star-shaped scar that she knows is a bullet wound etched just below her ribs. She runs her fingers along the white ridges, traces them from the new, much more vibrant scar to the long scratch of a knife wound beneath it, one that’s crisscrossed with yet another. It crosses her mind that there might be more scars beneath the surface, along her lungs, her heart, that she can’t see.

But she can’t think like that.

She just wonders, yet again, what sort of job they have to leave them so covered with marks.

* * *

The best part about cowboy boots isn’t the way they fit to the curves of his feet like a second skin, isn’t the soft leather look stitched with designs that were much more appealing than the softer ones of cheaper tennis shoes, but is the clip-clop-clunk of the little heel on hard floors – tiled, wooden, _concrete_ – all of them that sound of him and his fellow deputies walking down the hallway, letting others know to be afraid and intimidated before they even showed up. Let them mock him for wearing heels – they’re better than other shoes, and they give him a slightly taller edge, so what does it matter?

He’s not really thinking about any of that.

He’s more concerned with the gunshot wound beneath layers of gauze wrapped around his torso. The wound still aches, and the gauze scratches roughly against his skin. He doesn’t wonder if it’s hurt his soulmate; he’s fairly certain he doesn’t _have_ a soulmate, given that he’s never had one of their wounds scar his own skin or leave its burning sensation the same way Cade had complained when his soulmate accidentally burned her finger.

He’d seen the matching mark on Theresa’s finger when Cade brought her to meet him, and he’d nodded and smiled at them both. It was easy to be happy for Cade. Harder to be happy for himself.

Either he doesn’t have a soulmate or whoever they are, they’ve never been hurt by anything other than the scars _he_ is leaving in _their_ skin. The world may not have been a fair place, but he doesn’t feel as though that is very fair for them.

It’s later that day that he feels the slight burning in the tip of his thumb and the burn scar spreading like a callus across its edge. He doesn’t smile then, but through the days after he begins a habit that he can’t explain later, his right forefinger brushing across the scar, shorn cropped nail digging at the edge of it as though he has to continuously remind himself that it’s even there at all.

And sometimes, when he touches it, he smiles.

* * *

They meet three months later.

She notices it before he does – she’s his _doctor_ , and her hands are in those vinyl gloves in case he has a latex allergy she isn’t aware of – and she knows the constellation of scars across his skin because she’s seen them so many times on her own – and then she sees the way his finger rubs against his thumb and _it’s not good practice_ , but she has the glove off her right hand before she can think and pulls his hand and lets their scars just touch. He stares at the singular burn on the tip of her thumb and brings it to his lips with the gentle apology he’s had building in his chest for those three months bursting through their seams.

She doesn’t have to ask because he’s wearing the star and she can read it.

But there are scars from childhood, ones that she remembers, the little cut at the nape of her hair line hidden beneath her long hair that she doesn’t know how to ask about. Not yet.

* * *

Their first time – in the shelter of his home, where she feels far more comfortable than she’s felt anywhere else, which is really what soulmate _means_ , isn’t it – she runs her fingers along the scars on his skin and when she can’t guess, she asks. And even when she _can_ guess, she asks.

And he talks. He says more than she’s ever heard him say at once because when stories start, they don’t stop, and sometimes he tells her before she can even ask because these two, _these three_ , are all from the same gun fight when he was in his first year as a deputy and his partner went one way and he went the other and he’d been not quite without cover but close enough to it that he’d been pierced and then hit with a knife and then—

She shuts his lips with a kiss because she can’t – she can’t – _she can’t_ – listen only to this without—

His fingers find his scar at the nape of her neck and he mentions a mother who’d hidden the knives in the top cabinet and he was an idiot young boy and he’d tried to get into them and tripped and fell and he _laughs_.

He finds his scar just under the curve of her right breast and it’s when he and his brother tripped in the river and he hit a sharp rock and it’d punctured his lung.

She brings his thumb to her lips and murmurs that she’d dropped a scalpel just after the sharp burn of his scar – she moves his hand to her waist, runs his fingers along the star-shaped scar just there – caught her unaware in the middle of a surgery.

They’d had to take her out so she didn’t contaminate anything, and she’d laid on one of the beds in the back, staring at the ceiling, wondering just how crazy her soulmate was that they’d do all this shit—

He kisses her and she laughs and tells him that’s enough for now because they have a lifetime of learning about the meaning of each of these scars.

* * *

When she has a c-section, it is the worst pain he has ever felt, but when he looks at it later, it is his favorite of all of their scars because it is the one that gives him their daughter.

* * *

Their daughter is born with a scar etched into the bottom of her right heel.

That doesn’t bode well.


End file.
